Nature The Art of Japanese Life

In the beginning, there was nothing but a dark, primordial ocean...

..but then two young gods, Izanagi and Izanami,

looked across the void and saw potential.

One day, they plunged a spear into the endless ocean and stirred.

When they removed the spear,

drops of water fell from its tip and formed a group of islands,

and together, these islands became the whole known world.

The gods called their creation Oyashima Kuni,

the land of the eight great islands.

Today its inhabitants call it Nihon, the Land of the Rising Sun -

but we know it by a different name.

Japan has fascinated me since I was a boy.

It's always seemed like a parallel universe,

a society so similar and yet so different from our own...

..and in this series,

I finally have my chance to explore the Japanese imagination.

I'll seek out its greatest artworks, both old and new...

..but this is also a journey into Japanese life.

I'll travel through its landscapes and its cities.

I'll enter its homes...

Wow!

..meet its craftspeople...

witness its rituals...

and even sample its food.

So, this little Bento box is like a work of art,

and it's almost too beautiful to eat.

Japan is a society in which so much is informed by aesthetics,

not just painting and sculpture, not just homes and gardens,

but the way you look at cherry blossom, the way you drink tea,

even the way you arrange your lunchbox.

And that's what I, as an art historian,

find so inspiring about this place.

In Japan, almost everything has the capacity to become art.

In this episode,

I'm going to explore Japanese attitudes to nature...

..from great landscape paintings and Zen gardens...

..to falling blossoms and soaring mountains.

The natural world is central to traditional Japanese aesthetics...

..and yet in modern Japan, that old relationship is deeply uncertain...

..but Japanese artists continue to work with nature, to revere it...

..and to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounds them.

Japan is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

It is famous around the world

for its vast cities and advanced technology.

Most of its citizens live far away from nature,

amid never-ending urban landscapes...

..and yet an astonishing 73% of Japan is uninhabited by humans.

Its mountains are so steep and its forests so dense

that people can barely penetrate them -

and, though beautiful, this country lives on a geological knife edge.

Japan contains 10% of the world's active volcanoes

and experiences a staggering 1,500 earthquakes a year.

In Japan, nature is ignored at one's peril.

These are the sacred Kii mountains in central southern Japan.

The Japanese have revered nature for millennia.

These beliefs are embodied in the country's native religion,

known today as Shinto...

..but, in some ways, it isn't even a religion.

Shinto has no founder, no scriptures.

For centuries, it didn't even have a name -

but it did believe the world is inhabited by spirits known as kami,

and these kami are all around us.

They live in the sun and the wind...

in trees and animals...

and even in rocks and boulders.

For Shinto, the world is endlessly animated by the divine...

..and here, deep in the forest, is a shrine.

There is a simple aesthetic.

Zigzags of paper hang from rope made of rice straw.

It's something you see all over Japan...

..but, beyond these components, Shinto doesn't produce much art.

The focus is on nature itself...

..although some natural phenomena get more attention than others.

This is Nachi Falls.

It's one of the tallest waterfalls in Japan,

and, of course, it boasts its very own kami.

MAN CHANTS

Every morning, a Shinto priest makes an offering

to the spirit of the waterfall.

Sake and rice are placed on a table alongside a golden wand.

CHANTING CONTINUES

Ritual is at the heart of Shintoism.

Kami can be good and bad, just like humans,

and rituals are performed to maintain good relationships

between the human world and the kami world.

In so much of the world, religion is about gods and saints and prophets -

but here in Nachi, and in countless other parts of Japan,

nature itself is being venerated,

and as I look up at this waterfall, 133 metres high, I can see why.

But even though Shinto doesn't have a strong tradition

of religious imagery,

I believe its influence can be felt

right through the history of Japanese art -

even in the most unlikely places.

These are netsuke.

They were used as toggles on the end of purse strings

as part of traditional Japanese dress.

They depicted all sorts of things...

..and though just accessories for clothing,

they are now revered as breathtaking miniature sculptures...

..and this is a particularly special one.

So, this bizarre little masterpiece was made a few hundred years ago,

probably by an artist called Harumitsu, who was based in Ise,

one of the great Shinto centres of Japan,

and it depicts a pretty much life-size cicada

that's beautifully carved out of boxwood.

Every single detail is anatomically correct.

So we have the compound eyes

at the top,

the beautiful tracery of the veined wings,

and this, this is the thorax and abdomen.

Those contain the muscles that produce the famous cicada chirp -

and if I turned it over onto the other side,

which I'm really quite nervous about doing, because I'm extremely clumsy,

we will see there is even more detail on the underside.

And you can see that the cicada is even grasping a little branch.

Absolutely beautiful.

Cicadas have a really important place in Japanese culture.

They are seen as symbolic of the summer, when they come out,

and this object was probably worn during the summer months.

But they're also seen as strangely melancholy creatures.

There's that famous haiku.

"Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die" -

but it's not only cicadas.

Japanese literature is filled with references to all kinds of insects,

to caterpillars and beetles and fireflies and dragonflies,

and indeed, even today, many Japanese people

have insects as pets,

and it's even possible to visit beetle petting zoos.

Now, this all might sound rather odd,

but actually, it's deeply revealing,

because in Japan, nothing in nature is too small to be important.

Everything is deserving of our respect,

everything is deserving of our attention,

even an intensely irritating insect like this one -

and that, I'm sure, is partly down to Shinto.

But Shinto isn't the only religion in Japan

with a special relationship to nature.

In Japan, there are numerous different schools and sects

of Buddhism, but one kind particularly intrigues me,

because it helped produce

some of the world's most sophisticated landscape art forms.

It is known by the Japanese as Zen.

BELL RINGS

Zen doesn't rely on scriptures or dogma

but instead tries to promote an intuitive understanding of the world

through meditation and repeated practical exercises.

Zen monks used a number of methods

to discipline their minds and their bodies and to help with meditation,

and one of them, one of these methods, was painting.

Japanese monks started to make brush paintings

in black ink on paper and silk.

Now, this technique had been developed by the Chinese

centuries earlier,

but the Japanese were quick learners.

And perhaps the greatest of these Japanese ink wash painters

was a man called Sesshu Toyo.

Sesshu was born in western Japan in 1420.

At the age of 11, he enrolled in a Zen temple,

where he trained to be a priest -

but, according to one anecdote,

Sesshu showed little affinity for Zen discipline.

One day, Sesshu was so badly behaved

that his masters got hold of some rope

and tied him to a pole as a punishment.

Now, after several hours of this,

Sesshu became so distressed that he started to cry,

and his tears gradually formed a puddle at his feet -

but then something remarkable happened.

Using his toe as a brush,

Sesshu painted the outline of a rat into his tears,

and then the rat came to life,

gnawed through the rope and set Sesshu free.

In the late 1460s, Sesshu travelled to China,

and there he learned the art of ink wash painting

from its native masters.

He went on to become one of Japan's greatest painters,

and I've come to the Tokyo National Museum to see his masterpiece,

a painting I've wanted to see for many years...

and we are the first film crew to ever be granted access to it

when it's not on display.

This is the splashed ink landscape.

Sesshu painted it in 1495 when he was in his mid-70s,

and though it might only have taken a few minutes to make,

it is the result of a lifetime's experience and skill.

Now, I'll be honest with you. At first, it doesn't look like much.

It just looks like some spatters on a page -

but gradually, an image, a landscape, begins to appear.

In the foreground,

a craggy outcrop of rock covered by trees and bushes...

..and in the background,

these towering mountains that are half hidden by mists

or perhaps an incoming rain shower...

..but as you look at this picture longer, you begin to see yet more -

so, down there, that is a little wooden building.

You can see the triangular roof.

There's a fence around its perimeter -

and that, believe it or not, is a wine tavern,

and we know that because the wine tavern banner

is hanging out the front of it...

..but there's more even than that, because below that wine tavern,

you can see two near-horizontal strokes,

and those represent the ripples on a lake...

..and to the right,

two people are rowing a boat across it.

You know, I find this painting absolutely breathtaking,

and what is so exciting about it

is the way it unfolds in front of your eyes...

..the way that, by looking at it, you bring it to life...

..and what I admire so much about it

is how he's achieved so much with such limited resources.

Look at the varieties of blacks,

these deep, dark, inky blacks

in the foreground,

and yet, in the background,

these blacks that are so pale

they are almost white...

and look at the variety of strokes,

the wide brushstrokes, the narrow brushstrokes,

the wet, the dry,

the washes, the scratches,

all this different variety of marks

combined and mobilised to create this landscape...

..and you know the thing I can't get off my mind?

This was made in 1495.

1495!

Back in Europe, we had the Renaissance going on,

and there were no images as audacious as this one.

You know, it would take 300 years, 400 years,

for the watercolours of Turner and Cezanne,

before any Western artist made anything as abstract as this.

Sesshu had helped create an intoxicating aesthetic,

one that preferred ambiguity to clarity,

absence to presence,

and the hazy mysteries of nature.

This quality is evident in the work of Sesshu's countless followers.

This is Hasegawa Tohaku's pine trees in the mist,

painted onto a folding screen about 100 years after Sesshu's landscape.

The trees drift in and out of the mists.

One can almost taste the cold, wet air.

Empty space is as important as the landscape it surrounds...

..and this emptiness is surely a visual metaphor

for the silences of Zen meditation.

Zen Buddhism didn't simply inspire the Japanese

to depict the natural world,

it also encourage them to recreate it.

While Sesshu and his colleagues pioneered landscape painting,

other monks turned to horticulture.

I've come to the northern edge of Kyoto

to see one of Japan's greatest gardens.

Ryoan-ji might be the most written-about garden in the world,

but it's also one of the least understood.

We don't know who designed it. We don't know who built it.

We don't know when it was made -

and we certainly don't know what it means.

I've come early in the morning to beat the crowds...

but I'm not allowed to step beyond the veranda.

This isn't a garden for walking in.

The ground is covered in white Shirakawa gravel

that's carefully raked every morning...

..and emerging from the gravel are 15 craggy stones,

surrounded by moss,

arranged almost randomly...

but there's nothing random about them...

..because 15 is an important number in Zen.

It symbolises completeness, since the entire Buddhist world

contains seven continents and eight oceans...

..but from where I'm sitting...

..you can't see 15 stones. You can only see 14.

In fact, it doesn't matter where you go,

you can never see all 15 stones at once,

and this is thought to be a reminder of human imperfection.

One mind can never understand everything.

As time passes, something remarkable happens.

The gaps between the stones come to life.

The emptiness fills up...

..and suddenly this modest courtyard

becomes a vast panorama of the world.

One moment the stones are moss-covered islands

in a rippling, foaming ocean...

..the next, they're mountaintops seen from above the clouds.

And then, just like that,

they're nothing more than a group of rocks in some gravel.

People have been trying to decipher

the meaning of this garden for years,

but I think its meaning, if it has any meaning,

ultimately comes from within us,

because, like Sesshu's paintings and like so much Japanese culture,

this garden is an almost blank canvas,

a place that enables the mind to wander in any direction it pleases.

The Zen preference for uncertainty and suggestiveness

might still seem alien

to us fact-loving, empirical, positivistic Westerners,

but it became a crucial part of Japanese culture -

and you can't understand Japanese culture

until you begin to embrace the beauty of mystery.

I've come 300 miles north of Kyoto to a suburb of Tokyo called Omiya.

It's an unremarkable place and seems a world away

from the wildernesses that inspired Shinto priests and Zen monks...

..but this place happens to be the nation's epicentre

of another art form that combines nature and culture.

These, of course, are bonsai.

Like many Japanese artforms, bonsai emerged in China.

It came to Japan perhaps as early as the sixth century,

and it continues to be practised today.

Kaori Yamada is unusual.

Most bonsai artists are men...

..but Kaori is the fifth generation of her family to keep bonsai,

and many of them are extremely old.

It's a beautiful tree...

..and how old do you think it is?

-We think over 300 years.

-Over 300 years old.

In the West, we might think of bonsai

as little more than pot plants,

but in Japan, it is a major imaginative endeavour.

Just like Sesshu and the creators of Zen gardens,

the bonsai artist is a maker of worlds.

So, what can bonsai tell us about Japanese attitudes to nature?

Just around the corner from Kaori Yamada's nursery

is Omiya's bonsai museum.

It's like an exclusive art gallery,

but in the place of paintings and sculptures there are trees...

..and I've come to see one in particular.

This magnificent bonsai is estimated to be about 500 years old.

It's a Goyomatsu tree,

a Japanese five-needle pine that only grows in Japan and Korea,

and it's one of the most popular species used

in the creation of bonsai -

and this creation is so remarkable that it's even been given a name.

It's called Uzushio, which means "whirlpool" in Japanese -

and you can see why.

The whole tree spirals with this remarkable, muscular energy.

It was actually designed to resemble a wave or a tsunami

crashing down on the shore.

The wood spirals with the currents and torrents of water,

and the needles are like the fingers of froth of a wave

as it breaks on the shore.

So, though it's small, although it's potted,

this is about the untamability of nature.

You'll also notice there's a great deal of dead wood on it.

The whole front has become this white,

ossified piece of driftwood

that spirals like an S throughout the tree,

and there are dead branches that have broken off.

Now, this isn't an accident.

This was cultivated, this was styled,

it was created,

and the purpose was to make this tree look aged and weathered,

to make it look like it had lived a long, hard life,

out exposed on a clifftop,

mutilated by the winds and the rain and the lightning...

..and I'm reminded, this piece is about the same age

as Michelangelo's David -

both of them about 500 years old,

and this, too, is a sculpture -

and, indeed, seeing it in this location, in a museum setting,

it has been elevated to the status of art -

but this is a living sculpture.

It hasn't been created once, it has been created and recreated

and reshaped and cultivated and nourished

and kept alive for generations...

..and, you know, there's a paradox at the heart of this,

because on the one hand, it's deeply contrived, deeply created,

deeply manufactured,

but it also attempts to look like it's the creation

of chance and nature.

Bonsai is ultimately about persistence in nature and culture...

but the Japanese also find beauty in something far more fleeting.

This is the flower of the Prunus serrulata

or, as it's more commonly known, cherry blossom.

The Japanese have revered the life cycle

of this delicately petalled tree flower

for more than a thousand years...

..and in March and April every year,

they gather beneath it to party and picnic.

This celebration, known as Hanami,

has become a vast national industry,

and millions of tourists now travel to Japan to join in.

No other country does anything quite like this...

..but the merriment disguises a melancholy.

The Japanese were fascinated with blossom

because they found it unbearably poignant.

After all, here was this beautiful little organism

that emerged, grew and dazzled

and then, within little more than a week,

fell to the ground and died.

For the Japanese, it was, of course, a fact of nature,

but it was also a lesson about the human condition,

a reminder that our lives also are painfully brief.

In Japan, blossom is celebrated not in spite of its transience

but because of it. It is beautiful precisely because it doesn't last...

..but the preoccupation with cherry blossom

was part of a broader set of interests.

Japanese culture celebrates all of the seasons,

not simply the spring...

..and so, in Japanese art, alongside the paintings of cherry blossoms,

there are also pictures of verdant summer foliage...

..vermillion maple leaves of the autumn...

..and the deep snows of winter.

I've often wondered why the Japanese are so preoccupied with the seasons,

and I think there are two reasons.

First, the seasons are really explicit here.

The winters are bitterly cold and dry, the summers are hot and wet,

and in the spring and the autumn,

the foliage just explodes into these unbelievable colours -

but I think there's another reason, as well.

Written language came very late to Japan,

and so the cycle of the seasons

became a really important tool for measuring time -

not just natural time, but human time, as well...

..and of all these pictures of Japanese seasonal surprises,

one is without doubt the most famous.

It is housed in the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.

This is Ogata Korin's Irises,

a pair of six panelled screens dating back to 1710.

Irises begin to bloom across Japan in May,

when spring explodes into summer,

and in this utterly irresistible painting,

Korin captures the excitement

of those first really hot days of the year.

The colours are so vivid and intense.

The greens look like they were painted only a few minutes ago

and haven't even had time to dry yet.

The petals are painted from the most expensive blue pigment

in the business, and the background, made from gold foil,

dazzles like sunlight reflecting off the water.

This painting was actually inspired by a tenth-century poem

that told the story of a group of travellers

who stopped for lunch at a river bank

that was ablaze with irises.

The travellers were reminded of a similar spot back at home

and became all nostalgic.

Now, this painting is also about nostalgia -

it's about longing for things that have gone,

and you can just imagine, 300 years ago,

the original owners of this painting

looking at it on a cold winter's night and feeling all warm inside.

What I admire so much about this painting is its simplicity.

Korin has distilled his subject to its fundamental ingredients

and then repeated them rhythmically,

almost as though it's music -

and there is a little secret to how he's achieved that.

If you actually look very closely at this painting,

you begin to see that it's actually stencilled.

This iris over here is identical to that one over there.

This pattern down here is absolutely identical

to that pattern over there.

What an image.

I know it's famous, but it really deserves to be.

I challenge anyone to stand in front of this picture

and not become just a little bit happier.

But the Japanese don't only celebrate the small and ephemeral.

In fact, their most famous natural symbol is anything but.

3,776 metres high, Mount Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan -

a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment.

Fuji has been revered here since prehistoric times,

venerated by Shinto and Buddhism alike.

The Japanese have been rhapsodising about Mount Fuji for centuries,

and it has inspired vast quantities of poetry.

One winter in the 1680s,

the father of haiku, Basho, made a journey to Mount Fuji,

but the weather was so bad that the mountain was invisible.

Many people would have been annoyed, but not Basho.

This is what he wrote.

"In the misty rain, Mount Fuji is veiled all day."

How intriguing!

For Basho, like his Zen predecessors,

mist and mystery was exciting.

After all, who wants an answer when you can have a question?

Yet Mount Fuji's global fame

is surely a result of something less ambiguous.

Mount Fuji is almost ludicrously perfect,

even on a drab and overcast day like today.

Triangular, snow-capped, nearly symmetrical,

this is a mountain almost as imagined by a child -

and Mount Fuji's form has been crucial to its fame.

Like the pyramids, like the Eiffel Tower,

its silhouette alone has become a metonym for an entire culture.

That flawless shape inevitably attracted artists.

They have been depicting Mount Fuji since at least the 11th century.

This ink painting, once thought to be by Sesshu,

shows the mountain shrouded in that mandatory mist

and towering over a wondrous landscape...

..but one artist immortalised it like no other.

Internationally, he is the most famous figure

in all of Japanese art -

almost as famous as Fuji itself.

Hokusai was born not far from Mount Fuji in 1760,

just a few years after its last eruption,

and he remained obsessed with the volcano throughout his life.

He lived in Edo, now Tokyo,

which was already one of the biggest cities in the world.

Hokusai's success came slowly.

He's best known for his woodcut prints,

but throughout his life he loved to experiment.

He made brush paintings of people and plants,

and he also made erotica.

The diversity of his output was breathtaking -

but for those who knew him,

this wasn't surprising at all.

Hokusai, I think it's safe to say, was a restless soul.

He changed his name more than 20 times.

He moved house 93 times -

but the one unshakeable thing in his life was his obsession with art.

Hokusai was passionately, maniacally,

pathologically obsessed with his craft

and was relentlessly determined to get better at it.

Hokusai, indeed, made his finest work late in life,

and the best of it was arguably a series of prints about Mount Fuji.

Between 1830 and 1833, when he was in his early seventies,

Hokusai produced his masterpiece, Thirty-Six Views Of Mount Fuji,

initially three dozen woodcuts

printed in an array of vivid colours.

They depict the sacred mountain from every imaginable viewpoint,

from towns, sea and sky,

from close up and vast distances...

..in all seasons and weather conditions...

..and ever surrounded by life in its endless abundance.

This is number 33 in the series,

from the Mishima Pass in Kai province,

just to the north-west of the volcano,

and I find this such a heart-warming image

that refers back to the old Shinto worship of trees.

This group of travellers down here, they are on a journey,

and they have stumbled on this remarkable cedar tree,

a tree so big it doesn't even fit into Hokusai's picture,

and, quite delightfully,

they are measuring its circumference

by linking arms around it -

but, of course, they, and even the tree, are dwarfed

by the giant mountain behind them,

which is almost being tickled by the clouds.

Now, we've all seen this image before.

It's actually one of the most famous pictures in all of art -

but, for that very reason,

we haven't always looked at it properly.

People are so taken with this extraordinary wave

that they don't always notice the rest of the picture.

They don't notice, for instance,

that there are in fact more than 20 people depicted here,

22 shaven-headed fishermen

who are heading home after a long shift on the water

and have run into a spot of bother -

and you can see them grabbing hold of their skiffs

as they're tossed around on the surf.

Are they going to make it?

Well, I think they probably are -

because, in the distance, the sacred mountain,

disguised as another wave,

is watching on.

I don't really think we can understand

how truly powerful this image originally was,

because we, in the West, we read images, like texts,

from left to right

while the Japanese read images the other way.

So, for us, we are travelling with the wave,

and it's really quite good fun,

but for the Japanese,

they are travelling against the wave

and it's really quite terrifying.

It's an absolutely breathtaking piece of design.

Every single element is manipulated to amplify the drama.

It's printed in this bright synthetic Prussian blue pigment

that hasn't lost any of its intensity over the years -

and the froth, I absolutely love the froth,

which is depicted as hundreds of individual fingers

trying to grab hold of their victims...

and this one is so simple,

but I could look at it for hours and hours and hours.

Fine Wind, Clear Sky,

otherwise known as Red Fuji -

red because that's the colour the mountain turns

when the sun hits it in the autumn months.

Now, for all The Great Wave's global fame,

within Japan this image was the most popular print of the series

by some way - and you can see why.

It has a simplicity that no other image has.

There are no people. There's no foreground.

There is simply mountain and sky

divided by one absolutely beautiful line -

but that simplicity is deceptive,

because, in reality, this is an unbelievably risky piece of work,

because what Hokusai has done

is he has taken the very subject of his picture, the mountain itself,

and pushed it off centre and almost off the edge of the page,

and then, to counterbalance that decision,

he's filled the whole left-hand side of the page with all these details,

the green forest, the clouds that look like a school of fish

and even his signature and the title.

Now, without those, this whole composition would fall apart,

and yet it works absolutely perfectly -

and that is what I find so thrilling about looking at this picture.

We're watching an artist at the very top of his game

setting himself an almost impossible challenge

and then triumphing in the end.

Hokusai's unforgettable images

celebrate both the permanence and impermanence of nature,

because whatever takes place around it, Mount Fuji stands firm.

Hokusai's humans are tiny and inconsequential by comparison,

and have little influence on their environment...

..but in the years after Hokusai's death,

Japan's relationship with its landscape changed dramatically.

In the 20th century, Japanese society rapidly modernised.

Cities expanded, vast swathes of countryside were developed

and roads and rail lines cut across the nation.

At the same time,

Japan was repeatedly ravaged by natural disasters...

..and these made the Japanese people yet more determined

to control their environment...

..concreting their coastlines and damming thousands of rivers.

Today it sometimes seems

that the Japanese aren't in harmony with nature -

they are at war with it.

Alex Kerr has written extensively

about modern Japan's troubled relationship with its environment.

The transformation of nature is not unique to Japan.

This has happened absolutely everywhere.

It happened with great speed and great thoroughness in Japan...

based on a kind of industrial sense

that everything should be made industrially useful,

and so let's cut down those messy forests

and replant them with nice sugi trees that line up in rows,

and they'll grow fast and they'll be good industrial lumber, you know?

Let's straighten out those messy rivers

and line them with concrete,

and that will be so much more civilised

and international and modern.

Tens of thousands of rivers have been dammed.

As a matter of fact,

it's said that only three rivers remain that are undammed -

and even those, of course, have concrete embankments.

Now, this is something that everybody did.

Look at America, where we built just horrendous dams by the thousand,

but at some point -

and this happened in most other industrialised nations -

there came a point maybe 20, 30 years ago

when we started to look back and review whether this was necessary -

and in America, we've torn down hundreds of dams,

including some very large ones.

Japan, unfortunately, is stuck on autopilot,

and so the idea that we must dam these rivers

got fixed in the bureaucratic system and goes on forever.

So it's natural to ask, well, why? Why couldn't Japan stop?

I think one aspect of it is that Japan is thorough,

and thoroughness is the strength of this culture.

That's why you have the tea ceremony

and that's why you have the excellence in car manufacture

and camera manufacture and the delicacy of Japanese art

and the incredible refinement of the gardens, all of that -

but these are two-edged swords,

and so, the other side of it is, that once Japan starts concreting,

boy, will it concrete -

and it can never stop until the last tiny little bit of roughness

has been smoothed out.

And there's another twist,

which I think is part of this paradox

of how could Japan be the land of aesthetic sensibility,

which it still is,

and large parts of it be as ugly as they are?

And I think it's because of focus,

and it's often been pointed out

that the Japanese are capable of looking at the beautiful rice paddy

and completely ignoring the big billboard

that's stuck right in the middle of it.

The thing about this Jurassic nature of Japan

is that that was ancient Shinto.

There was something mysterious, divine...

That's where the Japanese saw the gods...

..and what I've found,

as I go around Japan talking and writing about these things,

is an incredible response from the Japanese.

That feeling is still within them, and I think that gives me hope,

and I'm already starting to feel a bit of a shift.

Japan is beginning, or the Japanese are now beginning,

to look at their natural environment and think, "Wait a minute."

So, there's something to be hopeful for.

All cultures are contradictory - of course they are -

but one of the most obvious contradictions here

is in the Japanese people's relationship to their environment,

because on the one hand,

Japanese culture has, from the very beginning,

been so sensitive to the beauty and fragility of nature,

but on the other hand,

one only has to travel around this country

to see how much of the landscape has been scarred...

..but even today, the great Shinto spirit still survives.

I'm travelling to a place I've wanted to visit for a long time.

Naoshima is a small island on the Seto Inland Sea

in the south-west of Japan.

It was originally inhabited only by fishermen,

but now it has some very different residents.

About 25 years ago, in the early 1990s,

a Japanese educational publisher called the Benesse Corporation,

together with other supporters,

started transforming this small island into a centre of modern art.

Naoshima is now home to dozens of museums,

installations and art projects,

and contemporary art from all over the world.

There's a distinctly James Bond feel to the place...

..But I've come to see a work

in which ancient Shinto attitudes to nature

have been brilliantly revived

by the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Sugimoto has long been inspired by nature.

He is perhaps most famous

for a series of photographs begun in 1980...

..black and white images,

all identical in form,

of seas, skies and horizons

from all over the world...

..but though they are universal,

they owe much to Japan.

They remind me of the mythical ocean origins of the country...

..the ambiguous inky brushstrokes of Zen painters...

..and Hokusai's attempts to capture a single form in every possible way.

What I want for the present is the consciousness of the human being

at the very early stage.

I was looking for some kind of image that I can share with early man,

ancient people, and probably...

..seascapes came to my mind,

the sea. The land, we changed it,

so we cannot see the land that the Stone Age people used to watch -

but the seascape, might be we can share the same images.

But on Naoshima, Sugimoto took on a quite different project.

This is the Go'o Shrine.

Inspired by Shintoism and Japan's ancient past,

it is both an artwork and a sanctuary.

There has been a shrine here since the 15th century,

but it fell out of use in more recent times.

In 2002, Sugimoto was commissioned to make an artwork on the site

and decided to build a new kind of structure.

I surprised myself that I received a kind of architecture commission.

That made my life change. That wasn't...

totally unexpected.

I'm proud of my life, that I became an architect, now!

HE CHUCKLES

The design is based on buildings at Ise, in southern Japan,

the holiest place in Shintoism.

The Shintoism is not well organised.

It's very hard to explain -

and after the Buddhism came to Japan in the sixth century,

only that time the people can write about coming...

and think about coming, with language -

but I think it's a very, very primitive stage of human mind...

..but still valuable - we have to think backwards,

how humans lived with nature

for many, many thousands of years.

Leading down from the small building,

a set of glass steps descends straight into the ground

to a hidden chamber below.

Here, Sugimoto has created a space he feels evokes prehistoric Japan.

It's so atmospheric down here,

deep beneath the volcanic Japanese rock -

and though this is a modern work of art by a modern artist,

there is something consciously ancient about it,

because this piece is inspired by the old Shinto idea

that the world around us, even the ground on which we stand,

is animated and energised by the sacred.

We destroy so much nature,

and now I think it's a turning point.

So, what has to be studied again,

the Shintoism kind of concept of spiritualism,

how to live with nature.

That's the message from Japanese Shintoism, I think.

I am back to where I started...

..in Japan's dense forests,

the flicker of the spirits all around me.

In the course of my journey,

I have encountered a culture whose preoccupation with nature

seems almost hard-wired,

that sees the landscape as sacred

and has painted and reshaped it for centuries -

and though modern Japan doesn't always seem to value nature,

nature has shaped its values,

aesthetic principles so different from those of the West.

It's often said that Japanese culture

is all about harmony with nature,

but that's not what I've seen.

This landscape may be beautiful,

but it's also unstable and dangerous,

and that paradox, I think,

is at the heart of Japanese interactions with nature.

On the one hand, they celebrate it, they revere it, they mythologise it,

but on the other hand, they possess an old yearning to tame it.

In the next episode, I'll take a very different path through Japan...

..a path through its greatest cities.

It's a story marked by dramatic periods of destruction and renewal

that unleashed new forms of creativity.

I'll explore its ancient capital and its refined culture.

I'll sample the energy of the emerging metropolis...

..before delving into today's megacity,

from its dark underbelly to its shimmering future.